[AMD Radeon r9 200 Series] Maximum settings eventually causes crash

Hello, hello! I seem to be having a bit of an issue? I recently got a new computer, and can normally play FFXIV on max settings with it. Good, right? Except after a while, it stutters from 60 FPS to 1... then promptly crashes, typically in an area with a large group of people. I usually bypass this by having LOD and Occlusion Culling on, but this is hardly a lasting solution, so I'd like your input.

So far, I've tried:

Disabling Steam overlay
Turning on LOD, and Occlusion Culling, logging out then back in
Updating my drivers
Optimizing via Raptr
Keeping only LOD streaming on

I'm afraid none of these worked---only leaving LOD and Occlusion Culling on prevent this, but I'd rather this not be my only solution.

Is anyone capable of walking me through a more thorough diagnosis?

It's a known issue with memory management with several families of cards. Tickets have been filed with the vendors multiple times. A few beta drivers got released that they hoped might have resolved the leaks, but not sure just how far they got with the process. Pretty much everyone here that was posting about it a while back opted to use the stream caching and such to help stave off the crashes.

With any luck, we will see an improvement with the DX11 client. The drivers really aren't optimized for DX9, which is what the game currently runs on. All the older DirectX calls are run through an emulation layer ever since Vista was released, so it isn't uncommon for games to have graphic/performance/stability issues in the newer hardware/Windows environments if they are still using the outdated DirectX schemes.

I'm hoping for that too, but recently I have sometimes been getting a few hangs when too many particles are in view. I worry that my new GPU might be kicking the bucket soon...

The Radeon R9 200 card especially the 290 is quite notorious for the memory leak issue with this game causing the crashes especially when you move/tele into high pop zones.

Not really an answer to the OP however for anyone coming to this thread looking for a fix for their game crashing as they have an AMD, there are graphical options you can enable which will help. They were mentioned before, but in case you aren't sure where to find them here's a screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/WfzQga8.jpg